Songpop: The Latest And Greatest Facebook Fad

One way you can tell if a Facebook game is getting traction these days is to see it plastered all over your friends’ feeds. Insert Friend Here is playing This Game, Insert Friend Here did This in That Game. The latest to crawl up the threatmeter is Songpop, a sort of ultramodern Name That Tune for you and your friends in a structure not terribly dissimilar to Draw Something. But does anyone remember Draw Something? Exactly.

In Songpop, much like its popular OMGPOP predecessor, you challenge people to a five-song gauntlet in an attempt to guess the songs the fastest. The rounds go quick (unless you truly haven’t listened to music) and the results go off to the selected friend, who then plays the same songs and the winner is determined by a match of knowing the right songs and being quick about it. You’re given a handful of genres to start from a variety, like Modern Country, 90s Alternative, Industrial, so forth. Using the coins you earn from winning (and even losing) these matches, you can then “purchase” new genres, like Blues or Christian/Inspiration or, y’know, whatever.

It didn’t take long to see that Songpop and Draw Something share a similar flaw: lack of content. Virtually every 90s Alternative match will feature one of two Nirvana songs, many songs are flipped between rounds to guess either the artist rather than the song title, or vice-versa, and some song clips state their titles right as they begin. There’s some cool competitive tricks in seeing when your opponent picks a song, but doesn’t elaborate on whether it was a right or wrong choice. If someone knows far more about country music than you do, you may be tempted to simply follow their lead, to a grizzly fate! The art direction is charming, but as you can see from the shot above, looks entirely like any other candy bright Zynga game, while they give you a lot of the popular genres up front for free. Having played the game for three days now, I think I can count the number of song packs I want to purchase in the future on one hand.

Still, it’s a fun diversion if you have friends that are willing to play with you on a regular basis, just don’t expect it to peak like Draw Something did.